It’s a fact that god created the universe, reality is in three dimensions, India is a developing country, you need to drink 6-8 glasses of water a day, that when you meet the right person it will be true love, and if you eat fat you’re going to get fat. These are indisputable facts. There’s no place for opinion, or feelings in any of this, right? If you opened your brain and added up all the time you’ve spent fact-gathering, how much time do you think that would add up to? How much of what’s in your head are anecdotes that you repeat and how much are simply true? Even if they’re not, who’s got time to figure out what the truth is, where to start, and how to see it?

Certainly, Science is true. That’s the bedrock of our culture. It’s always been true and it always will be true. That is, until you look to the past and realize it’s a modern invention not at all shared around the world. It blows up the closer and closer we get to it. That’s not anti-science sentiment, just that we do need to take a closer look at ourselves, our minds and how we perceive reality. The closer we look, the more we realize there’s some pretty big gaps.

There’s a certain set of folks who put a lot of effort putting a flashlight on the fact that we’re all trading the same ideas. We’re reaching for the same pre-conceived answers. That may not help us grow. It won’t change our cultural trajectory. In fact, by readdressing and letting go of those things, it may help us frame something completely different. Something a lot more exciting and helpful for our connection and belonging with each other.

One of those people is Hunter Maats. His book, “The Straight A Conspiracy,” blew up the templated idea of what it means to be a student. He’s taken a lot of that same questioning and is applying it to bigger and broader issues. Whether as a guest on Joe Rogan Experience or Tangentially Speaking or his own, Mixed Mental Arts podcast, Hunter Maats is challenging us to look between the lines and let go of the categories that we’ve conveniently been handed. To start using a different box of crayons that we can use to color a reality that unites the human experience back to the connection we so desperately seek. In this show, we talk about our category instinct, our pattern-matching machine, our convenient reality that has been so carefully and tightly mapped for us— then turn that orange inside out.